[This
is the fourth essay in the book The
Dispossession of the American Indian – And Other Key Issues in American History (Washington, D.C.: Scott-Townsend
Publishers, 1995).It also appeared in
The Journal of Social, Political and Economic Studies, Fall 1993; inthe British journal of opinion RightNOW,July/Sept. 1996,
pp. 8-9, in an abbreviated version;also in a shortened version in Conservative Review, March/April 1994, pp. 24-31; and was reprinted in
The St. Croix Review . ]

THE "HOLLYWOOD BLACKLIST"

In November 1947 the leading executives of the American film industry met at
New York City's Waldorf-Astoria hotel and issued the "Waldorf
Statement," which declared that they would not knowingly employ a
Communist or a member of any group that advocated the violent overthrow of the
United States government.

It is almost half a century since that beginning of what is known as
"the Hollywood blacklist." There ensued a period of years during
which most American film studios shunned, sometimes completely and sometimes
just in part, a number of screenwriters, directors, screen personalities, and
assorted industry personnel who had been actively involved in the Communist movement,
usually as Communist Party members and almost always as participants in the
many "front organizations" controlled by the Party.

The action by the film-industry executives followed in the wake of the
October 1947 hearings of the House Committee on Un-American Activities
inquiring into Communism in the motion picture industry. What is today best
known about those hearings is that ten witnesses refused to testify, citing the
First Amendment, and were sent to prison for up to a year for contempt of Congress.
This group is known as "the Hollywood Ten."

Today, as then, America's intellectual culture is overwhelmingly to the
left. It is a central fact about American life that the articulation of ideas
from the media and other main sources of opinion continually indoctrinates us
in the mythology of the Left. In that context, "the Hollywood Ten"
have been made into martyrs and "the Hollywood blacklist" has become
a catchphrase illustrating the alleged bigotry and hysteria that the Left has
so long argued are inherent in American life. The public has been deluged with
documentaries such as Hollywood on Trial and Legacy of the
Hollywood Blacklist; and with films such as Julia, Woody Allen's The
Front, and Robert de Niro's Guilty by Suspicion; with university
symposia, such things as an American Civil Liberties Union commemorative dinner
toasting the Hollywood Ten and their lawyers, and a fortieth-anniversary
editorial in The Nation.

The most significant fact: an inversion
of values

What may be most important to notice about the "blacklist" is that
the Left has managed a startling inversion. (At least it should be startling;
the fact that it is not, but rather is taken for granted as expressing an
accepted truth, illustrates just how much we have absorbed the Left's outlook.)

This inverted view pictures the devotees of a totalitarian ideology as
well-meaning idealists and innocents even years after it became apparent to all
who cared that the ideology's leaders were killing millions. Simultaneously, it
portrays those who sought to protect a society based on individual freedom as,
what?--intolerant, fanatical, self-serving, authoritarian, and contemptuous of
the life of the mind. Through the inversion, the totalitarians become the
martyrs and heroes; the elected representatives of a free people and the
executives of the film industry who sided with them become a personification of
narrow and pinched intolerance.

If this inversion were corrected, we would see the "Hollywood
Blacklist" in a far different light. We have undergone a warping of
perception through years of partisan propaganda.

This warping could hardly have come about without the double standard that
the world Left has so long applied to Nazism and Communism--a double standard
that was for many years used to protect one of the totalitarian systems. It
does more than affect our general perception of modern history;1 it
continues by having a role in the "culture war" precisely with regard
to specific issues such as the "blacklist," where even today we are
induced to take a benign view of those who took part in the Communist movement.
We would entertain no such view of people who participated in, say, the Nazi
Bund.

With regard to Nazism and Hitler's Germany, we are accustomed to shudder at
the memory of its brutalities and to recognize it as pure evil. But with regard
to Communism and its embodiments in Stalin's U.S.S.R., Mao's China, or Pol
Pot's Cambodia, we have no such visceral reaction. There are no Holocaust
Museums to remind us of the tens of millions of its victims. We see no photos
of the emaciated millions starved to death as a matter of state policy in the
Ukraine famine and entertain no indelible images of the tragically faceless
inmates of the vast Gulag Archipelago.

The fact is that both Nazism and Communism had their "idealistic"
features and were not perceived by their supporters, at least at first, as
evil. One involved a secular religion of nation and blood; the other a like
religion of class hatred and dreams of emancipation. Both swore eternal enmity
to the "classical liberal" ideals of personal and familial autonomy,
representative government, the Rule of Law, and toleration of diverse opinion.
Both supported and justified the use of brutality as an essential means. It
makes no sense to think of the Nazi as a jack-booted trooper while picturing
the Communist in softer, more accepting pastels. Secret police and executions--
if it weren't for the double standard, these would be as much a part of our
image of Communism as of Nazism.

What I will do in this essay

The subject of this essay is actually much broader than the simple facts of
the "blacklist." Those can be told simply enough--and I will do that
early on. But what is most important is to place those facts in their context,
both before and after the late-1940s and 1950s. This requires a broader view,
and most certainly more patience, than modern readers are accustomed to
bringing to a subject. There can be no proper understanding of the
"blacklist," however, without this continuity of attention.

Here, in a quick preview, is what we will do:

First, note the fact of inversion, remind ourselves as forcefully as we can
of the totalitarian nature of Communism, and realize the existence of the
double standard that has muddied our consciousness of its brutality. I have
just spoken about these, but they deserve much more attention than I can give
them here.

Second, recount the facts about the "Hollywood Ten" and the
"Blacklist" as a specific episode in American history.

Third, understand the events of the 1940s and 1950s in the context of the
long-standing domination of American culture by the Left, which has included
but has by no means been limited to members of the Communist Party. We need to
grasp this context as it existed before and at the time of the
"blacklist," but most especially during the 1960s, 1970s and
beyond--a period during which the literary and artistic Left has reigned
victorious. The hegemonic vision of the Left--the very opposite of a
suppression of leftist ideas--is the principal legacy that has come down to us.
We see this in the leftist content of so many films in recent years.

Fourth, grasp Communist ideology as just part of a much more extensive
intellectual culture of alienation. The Communist Party members of that day,
including the "Hollywood Ten," were the tip of a vastly larger
iceberg. The problem was so much bigger than "Communists in the film
industry" that a certain distortion occurs, by way of diminution, in
focusing on that.

Fifth, understand that the Communists of the late 1940s and early 1950s were
the hardcore Stalinists who remained loyal to Stalin (who was still alive and
ruling through terror) years after many on the Left had "heard the
screams" and abandoned their pro-Soviet stance. The idea that they were
naive innocents (as reflected in the title of one of the books on the subject
of the blacklist, Radical Innocence) has no substance; they had stayed
with Stalin even while countless others had seen through to the horror. Sixth,
see that all of this has continuing relevance as part of the "culture
war" that has been raging over control of America's self-image, memory and
future direction. How we understanding the past--including such things as the
"blacklist"--is pivotal to how we see ourselves, the generations
before us, and the generations that are still to come.

Details of the "Blacklist"

The 1947 hearings.

During the second half of October 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities
held two weeks of hearings into the issue of Communism in the film industry in
the Caucus Room of the Old House Office Building in Washington, D.C.

In all, forty-one witnesses were subpoenaed. These included a number of
Hollywood personalities who told of Communist penetration of the industry.
These witnesses, dubbed "the friendly witnesses" in the literature
because of their cooperation with the committee, included the likes of Howard
Rushmore (a former film critic for the Communist Daily Worker), Ayn
Rand (the novelist and philosopher who started her writing career as a
screenwriter shortly after arriving in this country as an emigre fleeing Soviet
Russia), Gary Cooper, Robert Montgomery, Ronald Reagan (who combined film
acting with leadership of the Screen Actors Guild, of which he was a
president), Robert Montgomery, George Murphy, and Walt Disney.

Nineteen "unfriendly" witnesses were subpoenaed, of which eleven
were actually called to testify. Of those eleven, ten refused to answer
questions about Communist Party membership, asserting that the First Amendment
protection of "freedom of speech" shielded them from testifying. (It
wasn't entirely clear in 1947 whether the Fifth Amendment provision against
self- incrimination would provide a legal basis for refusal to testify. If
these witnesses had "taken the Fifth," as many did later, it is
likely that the courts would have accepted that, and that accordingly they
would not have gone to prison for "contempt of Congress.") The
eleventh, the German Communist Bertolt Brecht, who had been in this country,
"got off the hook" by dissimulation, if not by downright lying: he
told the Committee that he wasn't a Communist--and then, as soon as the
hearings were over, left the country for Communist East Germany.

The ten who refused to testify have since been known as "the Hollywood
Ten," the original nineteen who were subpoenaed as "the Hollywood
Nineteen." The ten consisted of Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester
Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner, Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz,
Samuel Ornitz, Robert Adrian Scott, and Dalton Trumbo. All ten were or had been
members of the Communist Party, although Lester Cole says that at least three
of the original nineteen were not.2 After each of the ten refused to
testify, an investigator for the Committee, Louis J. Russell, provided the
Committee with a copy of the witness's Communist Party registration card.

Vote in the House; contempt proceedings.

Within days, the House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly--by 346 to
17--to charge the ten with "contempt of Congress." The ten were tried
in the courts, found guilty, lost an appeal by one of them to the United States
Supreme Court, and sent to prison.

The Waldorf Statement.

Also shortly after the hearings were over, on November 24, 1947, fifty
representatives of the Association of Motion Picture Producers, the Motion
Picture Association of America, and the Society of Independent Motion Picture
Producers met at the Waldorf-Astoria. The ensuing declaration stated that they
would not knowingly employ a Communist. It committed the producers to discharge
or suspend the "Hollywood Ten," and not to rehire them until they had
declared under oath that they were no longer Communists. The statement voiced
its awareness of a potential for an "atmosphere of fear," and pledged
the industry not to carry out the anti-Communist policy in a way that would
hurt innocent people.3

1951-54 hearings.

The House Committee on Un-American Activities conducted additional hearings
between 1951 and 1954, during which 212 people in the motion picture industry
were named as Communist Party members.4 Some of these, such as Larry
Parks and Richard Collins, renounced the Communist Party and testified about CP
activities and personnel. Others--such as Lillian Hellman, who had for several
years lived with the Communist mystery writer Dashiell Hammett--took the
position, which the Left praises as sensitive and heroic, that they were
honor-bound not to name names. (If these had been hearings into the Ku Klux
Klan or the German-American Bund, we would scoff at such a "commitment to
associates" as most certainly not praiseworthy; again, it is only the
double standard that causes people to accept the Left's perception.)

Objectives of the Communist Party in the film industry.

The most obvious purpose for the CP in Hollywood was to influence the
content of motion pictures. It has become commonplace to say that no
"Communist propaganda" ever got into a film because movies were
worked over by many diverse people before a picture was released.5

But this denial is a sophistry. For purposes of the argument,
"Communist propaganda" is defined as limited to the unique positions
taken by the Soviet Union during periods when the "Communist line"
differed from the pro-Stalinist attitudes of the West's predominant
intellectual culture. It is not considered enough for a Communist to have
succeeded in interjecting a strongly anti-business or anti-bourgeois message--
that wasn't "Communist propaganda," the argument goes, because
leftists in general, not just Communists, were advancing those doctrines.6

For example, from 1929 until August 1935, the Soviet Union denounced all
democratic socialist and welfare-statist movements, along with its denunciation
of everything pro-capitalist, as "social fascist." So it was possible
during that period to display a "Communist" point of view that was
distinguishable from that of the rest of the world Left. It wasn't possible to
do so, however, during the "Popular Front" period that lasted from
August 1935 until the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in August 1939,
since the Soviet Union was then full of praise for everybody except Nazis; it
even praised "free enterprise." This was followed by almost two years
of Soviet hostility while the Hitler-Stalin Pact lasted, and again it was
possible to appear uniquely "Communist." When Hitler invaded the
Soviet Union in June 1941, though, Communists again became "as one"
with social democrats. This lasted during the war, but in May 1945 a leading
French Communist, Jacques Duclos, signaled another abrupt about- face of the
Communist line by writing a letter, the famous "Duclos letter," that
again took a strident line and ushered in the Cold War.7

Those who say that the Hollywood Communists never affected film content are,
upon examination, saying no more than that the uniquely Soviet attitudes that
existed during periods of Soviet hostility to the democratic Left or to the
nations opposing Hitler didn't find their way onto the screen. They could
hardly deny, though, if they bothered to mention it, that the Communist
screenwriters, etc., in conjunction with other members of the Left whom they
tended to lead, succeeded in getting a large amount of intensely leftist bias
into films.

One impact on content was to veto anti-Communist film efforts. This veto
found ready support in the "anti-anti- Communist" attitudes of so
many "liberals" and social democrats.

Other purposes served by the Hollywood branch of the Communist Party,
according to John Cogley in his book on the blacklist, included putting the
party into a favorable light by taking advantage of the glamor of Hollywood
celebrities, raising money, assisting in the organizational work of the
Communist Party within labor groups on the West Coast, and creating a pool of
talent to help in the party's own media work.8 Communists in the
film industry were, of course, in a favorable position to secure employment for
others. And, certainly not least, members whose participation in the party
remained undisclosed were valuable as leaders of Communist front organizations.9

So important was the Hollywood branch to the party that it was placed under
the direct supervision of the party's national office in New York City rather
than under regional or state direction.

Who were they? -- the Hollywood Ten.

Within the supportive literature itself, there seems no dispute about the
fact that each of the Hollywood Ten was, or recently had been, a member of the
Communist Party--a fact worth remembering.

Alvah Bessie, screenwriter, was nominated for an Oscar for his part in
formulating the story for "Operation--Burma" in 1945. He had served
as the drama and film editor for New Masses between 1939 and 1943.
Before that, he was a volunteer in the leftist International Brigades in the
Spanish Civil War. It wasn't until 1954 that he quit the Communist Party.10

Herbert Biberman, director, joined the Communist Party in 1934. When the
Hitler-Stalin Pact convulsed the world Left in 1939, Biberman was among those
who defended Stalin, claiming the Pact was a fascist lie. He is said to have
made his place in motion picture history as director of "Salt of the
Earth" (1954), a radical film made by blacklistees about a
Mexican-American miners' strike.11

Lester Cole died in 1985 while still an active Communist and the film critic
for The People's World. He, too, had joined the party in 1934 (at the
time Stalin was starving millions to death to suppress Ukrainian nationalism
and to force the collectivization of agriculture). Cole mostly did scripts for
'B' movies, but wrote "Born Free" and other film scripts under
pseudonyms after he served his term in prison. His father, a Jewish immigrant
from Poland, had been a militant socialist; and Lester said in this autobiography
that he (Lester) had been greatly inspired in 1925 by a revolutionary novel by
Maxim Gorky. In the late 1930s he defended the Hitler-Stalin Pact and the
Soviet Union's invasion of Finland. (If he cared at all about the U.S.S.R.'s
attack during the same period on Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, his
autobiography doesn't show it.) He said about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg,
executed for atomic espionage, that they died for a "just cause."
Late in life, he attended various film festivals in Moscow and was enthralled
by what he saw there.12

Edward Dmytryk, a film director whose two best-known movies were
"Murder, My Sweet" and "Crossfire," joined the Communist
Party in 1944. He renounced the party in 1951 after serving six months for
contempt, and testified about twenty-six others who had been in the party.13

Ring Lardner, Jr., son of the great humorist, joined the party in 1936, two
years after he travelled to the Soviet Union. "We did play a part, I
think, in most everything that was going on in the Hollywood scene.
Organizations such as the Motion Picture Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy,
the Hollywood Anti- Nazi League, and the League of American Writers would not
really have functioned anywhere near to the extent that they did," he
said, "without the very active participation of Communists in their
forefront." In the 1930s he defended Stalin's purge trials (the great show
trials that accompanied Stalin's killing of so many of the original leaders of
the Bolshevik Revolution), and the Hitler-Stalin Pact. Otto Preminger ended the
blacklist for Lardner in 1960, and he won an Oscar (his second) for his writing
of "M*A*S*H*." In the late 1980s, as Communism fell apart in the
Soviet Union, Lardner finally joined the train of disillusioned former Communists.
Note, however, the odd lack of emotion: "I think I have come to see that
we were quite wrong in our image of Stalin. The mere fact that no society has
as yet successfully worked on a socialist basis without impinging on a lot of
important freedoms makes me wonder about the basis of it all."14

John Howard Lawson was in 1933 the first president of the Screen Writers
Guild. He had written radical plays for the New York stage before he moved to
Hollywood in 1928, but in 1934 Mike Gold, writing in New Masses, accused
him of indecisiveness. This stung him into formally aligning with the Communist
Party. Over the years, he wrote prolifically for such Marxist organs as the Daily
Worker and New Masses, took part in a large number of front
organizations, and was one of those who organized the Hollywood branch of the
Communist Party in the late 1930s. In 1938, Lawson was among the signers of a
manifesto defending the purge trials. The Hitler-Stalin Pact caused him some
trouble, but he got over it when Hitler invaded the U.S.S.R. in June 1941.
During the blacklist, he managed to keep busy writing motion picture and
television scripts under an assumed name. In fact, he wrote the screenplay for
"Cry, the Beloved Country" while in prison.15

Albert Maltz, screenwriter, wrote several plays in the 1930s that Bernard F.
Dick, in Radical Innocence, says "reflect the era's preoccupation
with political corruption, social injustice, capitalism, union-busting, the
munitions industry, and profiteering" [i.e., with the themes of the militant
Left]. It was Maltz's novels, however, that were most heavily Marxist. He was
active in the Communist Party and wrote for New Masses. Maltz served
ten months for contempt.16

Samuel Ornitz, screenwriter, born in 1890, became a socialist when he was
twelve, giving speeches from a soapbox on the lower east side of New York City.
In 1919 he wrote a proletarian play under an assumed name for the People's
Playhouse in New York City. Later in Hollywood he was active in the Communist
Party, helped found the Screen Writers Guild, and was prominent in front
organizations. He defended the Hitler-Stalin Pact, but became disillusioned
with Communism in 1953, the year Stalin died.17

Adrian Scott, screenwriter and producer, is spoken of by Larry Ceplair and
Steven Englund in The Inquisition in Hollywood as a Communist, but I
have not found reference to when he joined or left the party. With the
assistance of collaborators, he managed to write prolifically for films and
television during the blacklist.18

Dalton Trumbo, screenwriter, joined the Communist Party in 1943 and remained
a member until 1948. He too managed to stay busy during the blacklist, winning
an Oscar under an assumed name in 1956 for "The Brave One." (In 1975
the Oscar was presented to him in person by the president of the Academy, in
line with the celebration of the Hollywood Ten by the film culture after the
late 1960s.)19

Others who were blacklisted.

The Waldorf Statement's expression of intent not to hire Communists led to a
large number of other people's being included in the ban, especially after the
hearings of 1951-54. Without attempting more than a sample, here are some of
them:

Martin Berkeley was a Communist screenwriter who first denied being a
Communist but later became a friendly witness, testifying in 1951 about 162
others who were active in the party. He became a leader in the anti-Communist
Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.20

Richard Collins was one of the Hollywood Nineteen but in 1950 offered the
FBI his full cooperation and testified about twenty-three who had been active
in the party with him.21

Lillian Hellman, said to be the first internationally- recognized woman
playwright, first became active in radicalism in film-industry trade unionism.
Although she always denied being a Communist Party member, there is speculation
in the literature about whether she joined, and more than one admitted
Communist testified that she was active in the party. It is clear that in 1930
she met Dashiell Hammett, the Communist mystery writer, and that she lived with
him for several years. She wrote the movie "North Star" in 1942 that
idealized a Soviet collective farm. In 1938 she had signed a New Masses
advertisement supporting Stalin's purge trials, and she endorsed the Soviet
invasion of Finland. She is a hero to the Left for the letter she wrote to the
House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952 claiming that as a matter of
conscience she could not name others who had been party members. When she
appeared before the committee, she invoked the Fifth Amendment provision
against self-incrimination to avoid answering about herself or others. Since
the 1960s she has been considered one of the celebrities of the period; and she
was honored for her play "Toys in the Attic" and with a National Book
Award. She died in 1984. Paul Johnson, in his book Intellectuals,
acknowledges her talent, but otherwise has little good to say about her,
summarizing that "disregard for the truth" was "central to her
life."22

Paul Jarrico wrote "Song of Russia" and was the producer of
"Salt of the Earth," described as a "militant verite labor
film." An article in Film Comment says that he was
"reputedly second-in- command to John Howard Lawson of the Hollywood
section of the Communist Party."24

Larry Parks, the actor who played Al Jolson in "The Jolson Story,"
was the first of the "unfriendly witnesses" to admit he was a
Communist and to testify cooperatively.25

The aftermath

Although the "blacklisting" is made the central issue in the
literature, what also seems striking is the media support for the Communists
and the extent that the ban was broken by behind-the- scenes collaboration by
leftists and "liberals" in the industry.

Lillian Hellman said in her autobiography that "the press was, in
general, very good."26 Lester Cole tells in his autobiography
about the editorial support he received from the Washington Post, Chicago
Times, and New York Times during the 1947 hearings. "The
press didn't let us down."27

This same phenomenon in the 1960s was a key to the tactical successes of the
New Left: a virtual monopoly of intellectual and moral articulation on the left,
putting the militants in a favorable light, while the "silent
majority" of the country had very little voice. It all turned on the
dominance of the alienated intellectual culture.

The condonation by "liberals" and other leftists was apparent in
many ways. In 1941 the Daily Worker serialized Dalton Trumbo's
anti-war novel, but this overt Communist connection didn't keep him from
becoming one of the highest paid writers in the film industry. In 1947 MGM
signed a contract with Lester Cole one day after he received his subpoena. In
1956 a vice president of the Screen Writers Guild accepted an Oscar for Trumbo
under the pseudonym he had used, fabricating a story that the author was with
his wife, who had supposedly just given birth.28 And John Howard
Lawson's being in jail didn't keep a friend from securing him the job of
adapting "Cry, the Beloved Country" to the screen.29

A "liberal" friend arranged television assignments for Ring
Lardner, Jr., in Britain while the blacklist was on. And Adrian Scott became
executive assistant to the head of the British division of MGM.30

The anti-Communists in
Hollywood

There were a number of people in Hollywood--such as Gary Cooper, Walt
Disney, Adolphe Menjou, Ronald Reagan, Robert Taylor, John Wayne and Sam
Woods--who opposed Communist penetration of the industry. These came eventually
to include several who originally were Communists themselves.

Blacklist against anti-Communists.

In her book The Passion of Ayn Rand, Barbara Branden tells how
"considerable pressure was brought to bear on the anti- Communist
witnesses to prevent them from testifying. Many of them were told, tacitly or
openly, that cooperation with the committee would be professionally damaging to
them." She says that "everyone who had testified for the committee--not
the big stars, but the lesser-known actors and writers...lost their jobs."31

John Cogley's book Report on Blacklisting says "the
'blacklisting of anti-Communists' was highly informal." He adds that
"there seems little doubt that Communist Party members in Hollywood,
during this period,...exploited their close relationship to, and influence
over, producers to discourage them from hiring anti-Communists."32

Don Feder, writing in the conservative journal Human Events, says
that "Morrie Ryskind, screenwriter for several Marx brothers movies, told
how the Reds smeared such anti-Communist actors as Adolphe Menjou, accusing
them of being anti-Semites or Nazis. There were death threats against those who
opposed them...Ronald Reagan...took to wearing a gun in self-defense."33

Joseph Farah has written in National Review that "it was the
Communists themselves who first instituted censorship and blacklisting in the
movie industry. Lardner, for instance, was among a group that circulated a
petition at MGM to halt production on a film whose political content they
disagreed with. Trumbo once boasted in a bylined article in the Communist
Worker that agents within the industry were able to spike 'reactionary'
and anti-Soviet scripts."34

This blacklist continues even today, long after the leftists have returned
to the industry. Harold Johnson, a writer for the Orange County Register,
told in early 1993 about how an interviewer made actress Shannen Doherty
"sweat BB's" because she led the Pledge of Allegiance at the 1992
Republican national convention. When Michael Medved was about to write his book
on leftist domination of today's film industry he was sternly warned of the
consequences: "You're going to become the most hated man in
Hollywood."35

I wouldn't want to be understood as posing a moral equivalency between
shutting out anti-Communists and closing the doors to Communists--any more than
I would between anti-Nazis and Nazis. An equivalence would again be based on
the moral inversion and on the double standard that embraces a benign view of
Communism.

Victory by the Left: its eventual
domination of film and of American culture

Despite the denials based on the sophistry I have mentioned, Communist
propaganda made its way into many films in the 1930s and 1940s. Talking in his
autobiography about the movie "Liberty" in 1936, Lester Cole says
"I saw an opportunity for a politically oriented subtext, which eventually
took over...The desperate farmers and cannery workers get together, form a
cooperative, illegally take over the cannery, and start production on their
own. The conflict, of course, is with the big corporation...." He says
that Herbert Yates at Republic reacted by ordering, "put that Communist
sh*t on the shelf. We're not releasing it." Nevertheless, the film was
later put into distribution to the "high praise" of the trade papers.36

Cole says that "in 1937, a truly revolutionary film appeared: a Warner
Brothers production of 'The Life of Zola'...It held nothing back. The power
elite and the military were mercilessly exposed as corrupt tyrants, immoral,
deceitful and willing to go to the most inhuman lengths to preserve the power
of the explicity described ruling class."37

He tells how two top films--"Mr. Deeds Goes to Town" and "You
Can't Take It With You"--were satires about "the corporate control of the country." And he adds that "'The House of the Seven
Gables,' in 1940-41, showed Northern capitalists of 1850 engaged in illegal
slave trade; it was a radical bombshell." Examples could be cited at
length.38

Far more important, however, has been the leftist domination of American
media, and most especially of Hollywood, since the 1960s. This has not amounted
to a specifically "Communist" domination, but to a heavy
preponderance by the alienated Left in general. (I remember watching a
television panel in Chicago in 1968, made up of representatives of radical
groups, in which the Communist on the panel was described by the others as the
least militantly radical among them.)

By the 1960s the American Left had itself gone through a significant
transition. Right after World War II, the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)
was established by "liberals" who did not want to continue
the collaboration with Communists that had existed during the war and earlier
during the Popular Front. They favored a clear delineation between
"liberals" and Communists. Those who didn't support this threw
themselves into the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), in which Communists
played a major role, and backed Henry Wallace for president in 1948.

Although an anti-Communist wing of the Democratic Party and of
"liberalism" remained, as represented by Senator "Scoop"
Jackson, any principled unwillingness to collaborate with Communists tended to
disappear in the second half of the 1960s. Communist representatives were
welcome at the "New Politics Convention," held in Chicago and
keynoted by Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1967. For most of the American Left, a
philosophy again took hold of "no enemies on the Left."39

Now, for at least twenty-five years, films have been produced in great
numbers presenting a more and more extreme leftist worldview. Probably the best
account of the several dimensions of this assault is given by Hollywood film
critic Michael Medved in his 1992 book Hollywood Vs. America: Popular
Culture and the War on Traditional Values.40 "Americans
are passionately patriotic, and consider themselves lucky to live here,"
Medved says, "but Hollywood conveys a view of the nation's history,
future, and major institutions that is dark, cynical, and often
nightmarish." Films emphasize "every possible failing of America and
its institutions."41 He devotes sections of his book to the
cynicism and depravity, the attack on religion, the assault on the family, and
the glorification of ugliness. In addition, he tells of the countless alienated
sub-themes portraying the likes of abusive husbands, corrupt parents, criminal
capitalists, hypocritical priests, and venal cops.

In fact, the dominant film culture has been carried beyond cynicism and
alienation, and into depravity, becoming nothing short of pathological. The
1960s Berkeley "filthy speech" movement led directly to obscene
language in most movies, including, Medved says, "in 'family fare' where
it is least expected."42 An example of the pathology is the
acclaimed film "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover" in 1990:
"...thugs tear the clothes off a struggling, terrified victim in order to
smear his naked body with excrement. They force filth into his mouth and rub it
in his eyes, then pin him to the ground while the leader of the band proceeds
to urinate, gleefully, all over him. The 'fun' proceeds in much the same
spirit, for two all- but-unbearable hours. We see sex in a toilet stall, deep
kisses and tender embraces administered to a bloody and mutilated
cadaver...Naturally, the critics loved it."43 Sado-masochism,
and a recent celebration of cannibalism in several films, attest to the
pathology.

The anti-Christian aspect is well illustrated by the Martin Scorsese remake
of "Cape Fear." Medved says "there is a new twist: the released
convict is not just an ordinary maniac [as in the original version of the
movie], but a 'Killer Christian from Hell.' To prevent anyone from missing the
point, his muscular back has a gigantic cross tattooed on it, and he has
Biblical verses tattooed on both arms. When he is about to rape the attorney's
wife, played by Jessica Lange, he says, 'Are you ready to be born again?'"44

Many of today's films build on the "politically correct" themes
insisted on by the Left. For example, "At Play in the Fields of the
Lord" is, Medved says, a "rainforest spectacle about natives and
their wholesome primitive ways and the sick, disgusting missionaries who try to
ruin their lives."45

There is no substitute for reading Medved's book in full, although that will
be more important for members of future generations than it is for our
contemporaries who can readily think of examples from the films they've seen.
Those who are unaware of the propaganda assault and the pathology are those who
wish not to see it; many Americans live in a state of denial and are
conditioned not to acknowledge that anything (other than conservatism) is
"ideological." They let the propaganda wash over them, becoming the
ideational medium within which they live.

Their silence, though, doesn't tell the whole story. Many Americans act
toward films in the same way the "silent majority" acts toward many
things, which is by avoidance rather than by confrontation (just as with
"white flight" they left the inner cities and are now leaving
California). American film viewers have been "voting with their feet"
during all of this period of ideological excess. Medved points out that the
depravity is not a response to public demand, but just the opposite.
Films would make far more money if they were wholesome, not depraved. He
analyzes the statistics about film attendance, and shows that such variables as
television, home video, and cable account for only part of the enormous drop in
film attendance. A major decline coincided with the New Left takeover in the
late 1960s: "Weekly attendance figures plummeted from 44 million in 1965
to a pathetic 17.5 million in 1969"--and the viewers have never returned. "Between
1965 and 1969 the values of the entertainment industry changed, and audiences
fled from the theaters in horror and disgust."46 It is
commonplace to say that the public demands 'R rated' movies, but in fact
attendance figures show that it is the 'G' and 'PG' films, with far less
cynicism and depravity, that succeed at the box office. The Hollywood Left is,
as the saying goes, "cutting off its nose [at least financially] to spite
its face." Ideology, and acceptance by ones peers in the intellectual-cultural
community, are far more important to it than money.

A profoundly alienated intellectual culture: for several decades far
more pervasive than "Communism."

A central fact about western civilization since 1820 has been the alienation
of its predominant intellectual-artistic culture from mainstream society, which
has been middle class and primarily oriented toward "classical
liberal" values and a market economy. The eventual rise of Nazism and
Communism as secular religions during the twentieth century related closely to
this alienation, and would have been impossible without it. As large as the
Communist movement was, it was merely a subset of the more pervasive phenomenon
of alienation within the intellectual and artistic community.

The alienation was expressed in literature and the arts well before the
twentieth century, but anyone wishing to understand the condition of American
culture since the mid-1960s should pay particular attention to the Dadaist
movement that occurred immediately after World War I. Better than anything
else, it shows the use of art and culture by the Left for extremity and
demolition.

Kenneth Coutts-Smith, in his book Dada, quotes Tzara, one of the
founders of Dadaism, as saying that the movement's beginnings "were not
the beginnings of art, but of disgust." "The most obvious aspects of
Dada, particularly in its early days," Coutts- Smith says, "was a
savage anarchism, a deliberate programme devised to undermine the moral and
social assumptions of existing middleclass society." He refers to "a
week of concerts at the London Coliseum, which performances were a great
success in avant-garde terms, bewildering and provoking a hostile
audience." He tells also of a 1920 exhibition in which "a great deal
of planning went into the arrangement of the exhibition in order to produce the
maximum amount of shock, scandal and social consternation. A site was
found...in a covered courtyard behind a cafe. The only entrance was through a
public lavatory, and the audience...was confronted by a room full of bizarre
objects...The exhibition was opened by a young girl dressed as for her first
communion who suddenly began to recite obscene verses."47

There is a direct link between this and the 1960s New Left antics of an
Abbie Hoffman and a Jerry Rubin. It was the precursor of the type of
"art" in the 1980s that involved a crucifix submerged in a jar of
urine, and of the extreme cynicism and depravity of today's film. All are
related. They stem from an intellectual-artistic culture that takes pleasure in
extremity and demolition--and in offending the middle class.

From this we see that when the House Committee on Un- American Activities
sought contempt proceedings against ten Hollywood screenwriters in the late
1940s, the event "barely scratched the surface" of the larger
phenomenon.

"Liberals" have long argued that the real target of the House
Committee, of Senator Joseph McCarthy later, and of other
"anti-Communists," was "liberalism" itself. Such a charge
isn't true; it was Communists, specifically defined as members of the party,
that in fact were the targets. Conservatives and "anti- Communists"
went far out of their way to differentiate. This was partly because they feared
recriminations if they failed to, and partly because our Constitutional
protection of "freedom of speech," in which they fully believed,
allows someone to hate our way of life and to say so.

As we look back, however, there is no reason for us to limit our
understanding. The reason the Left has been able to dominate American culture,
including film, since the 1960s is rooted in the fact that American
intellectual culture was profoundly leftist from early in the century, and
even, to a high degree, for a century before that. There was an enormous wave
of alienation, especially during the "Red Decade" of the 1930s, and
those who actually went so far as to join the Communist Party were just a
fraction of the flood.

The problem has been, and remains, a civilizational one: how can a society
of free individuals come to have an intellectual culture, including an art and
a literature, suitable to itself? Throughout the modern age, this has been
lacking, as the intellectual culture has festered in its envy and resentment.

The Hollywood Communists were the
hard-core

Let's shift now from a very broad arena to one that is far more narrow, and
ask just how much sympathy the Hollywood Communists, including the
"Hollywood Ten," deserve."

I have already suggested that they deserve none,and that they would receive
none if it were not for the double standard that has for so many decades
induced a sanguine view of Communism. But I have covered that, and what remains
is for us to note that American Communists of the late 1940s and early 1950s
weren't even typical of the intellectuals who felt so strong an infatuation
with the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s. Instead, they were the
"hard core" of devotees who remained loyal to a totalitarian system
long after its totalitarian nature and gross brutality became clear. They,
especially, deserve no sympathy. Most assuredly they do not deserve to be
considered heroes.

Many felt qualms about Communism at the beginning of the Stalin purge
trials, as one after another of the old Bolsheviks were paraded before a farce
of a trial and then shot. These were people who were known to the many American
"liberals" who had made pilgrimages to Soviet Russia.

A few allowed themselves to hear of the slaughter of the "kulaks"
(originally defined as "the more prosperous peasants," but who, as the
slaughter went on, came to include all peasants) in the Ukraine and
elsewhere--and began to feel a shudder. Successive shudders came with later
Stalinist liquidations, such as the late-1930s purge of the generals.

Many on the left began to have doubts when Stalin exiled Leon Trotsky, one
of the heroes of the Bolshevik Revolution. The world Left set up international
tribunals to inquire into this in-house conflict. The philosopher John Dewey
headed the American subcommission. The final chapter of this drama came when
Stalin had Trotsky murdered with an ice pick in Mexico City in 1940.

Others left with great bitterness when they found that in Spain during the
Spanish Civil War the Communists were killing the anarchists--at a time when
both were thought to be allied together against General Franco. This is what
turned John Dos Passos around; he lost a friend to the liquidation.

Most jolting was the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, which marked an
abrupt about-face after years of Popular Front activity against Hitler. This
prompted many people to leave the Communist Party. Defections continued as the
Soviet Union joined Germany in the attack on Poland, and within a few months
attacked Finland and the Baltic states, swallowing the latter.

Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and America's subsequent
alliance with Stalin helped anesthetize these grounds for defection. But the
Duclos Letter in May 1945 made it clear that Soviet respectability was
temporary.

The fall of the Iron Curtain was followed in quick succession by the Soviet
devouring of Eastern Europe, the Communist attempt to conquer Greece, the
Berlin Blockade, the "Lysenko Affair" in which the Soviet Union
scandalized the scientific world by trying to impose an ideological straight-
jacket onto genetics, the Hiss-Chambers case, the Klaus Fuchs and Judith Coplon
cases, the fall of China to Mao, the North Korean attack on South Korea and the
intervention of Red China into the war, the Rosenberg case, Krushchev's
"secret speech" revealing Stalin's crimes...and on and on.

Anyone who has read the journals of that period is aware that those who
still remained Communists in the late 1940s and early 1950s were in no sense
naive and innocent. They were the people with cast-iron stomachs.

The "Culture War" -- today's
context for the struggle

Why does the "Hollywood Blacklist" matter today? Because it has
become part of the folklore of the Left, which promotes its own demonology.
From such allegations as "the brutal slaughter of Native Americans at Wounded
Knee, the [so-called] internment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II,
the Hollywood Blacklist, and the killings at Kent State," we are
encouraged to form a cynical, demoralized memory of America's past.

ENDNOTES

1. See my discussion of this double standard in Liberalism
in Contemporary America (McLean, VA: Council for Social & Economic
Studies, 1992), 240-42.

3. The Waldorf Statement is quoted in full in John Cogley, Report on
Blacklisting--I: Movies (New York: Arno Press & The New York Times,
1972), 22-23.

4. Ibid., 110.

5. Such denials of impact on film content can be found, for example, in
Cole, Hollywood Red, 159; in Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The
Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930-1960
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1980), 324; and in Cogley Report,
42.

6. This approach, looking for distinctively "Communist" content
reflecting the "party line" at points at which it differed from the
views of leftists in general, was taken by Dorothy B. Jones in her
"Communism and the Movies: A Study in Film Content," which is
included in Cogley, Report, as an appendix, pages 196-233.

7. The phases through which the "party line" passed are summarized
by Dorothy B. Jones in Cogley, Report, at 205. The history relating to
the Duclos Letter is set out by Ceplair and Englund in the Inquisition in
Hollywood, 232.

35. The article by Harold Johnson of the Orange County Register
appeared in the Wichita Eagle on March 15, 1993.

36. Cole, Hollywood Red, 147-49.

37. Ibid., 164.

38. Ibid., 165-66, 172.

39. For a discussion of the New Politics Convention and the role of
Communists in it, see my article "Martin Luther King, Jr.: Time for a
Sobering Reassessment," Conservative Review, February 1991,
18-22.